Do You Miss the Old J.Crew? This Revamped Label Might Be the Answer to Your Prayers
Do You Miss The Old J.Crew? This Revamped Label Might Be The Answer to Your Prayers
There’s a question that’s been thrown around a lot in the Alex Mill office during the last few months: “Do people really need more clothes?” The answer, according to designer Somsack Sikhounmuong, is maybe not, but “you need the right clothes,” he says. This has become the philosophy behind the relaunch of Alex Mill, a line of men’s shirts founded in 2012 by former J.Crew CEO Mickey Drexler’s son Alex Drexler. Sikhounmuong, who spent years as the chief design officer at J.Crew and Madewell, is the new creative director of Alex Mill. Today, the label makes its official comeback with the addition of a women’s collection that includes a worker’s jacket, dress, jumpsuit, tees, knits, and a small collection of accessories, like a straw tote with a customizable handle made from a vintage scarf (part of an ongoing partnership with Brooklyn vintage retailer Front General Store). Prices range from $35 to $175, and all Alex Mill items will be sold on the brand’s own revamped website and on platforms like Nordstrom, Barneys New York, Net-a-Porter, Goop, and Mr Porter.
Everything in the collection is made with soft cottons from Italy, Portugal, and Japan, and it’s all meant to look and feel lived-in, says Sikhounmuong. The colorful, garment-dyed basics all have a “warm glow,” he notes. “Hopefully that makes you want to jump into something quicker than a piece of clothing that is still and cold.” Alex Mill’s new women’s offering is tightly edited and meant to appeal to an audience that craves a little bit of streamlining and simplicity in their everyday wardrobes. In a post-J.Crew boom, where fashion has become so much about logos and labels and one-off It luxury items, as well as mixing those pieces with fast-fashion copycats, the old way of shopping for white T-shirts, jeans, and khakis—aka falling into the Gap or tagging pages of the J.Crew catalogue—seems like an appealing proposition at the moment. After heading up the design teams at two behemoth brands, Sikhounmuong himself felt the need to focus on something much smaller in scale. “Ease is really coming back again,” he says. “We’re huge proponents of zeroing in on the essentials. You can keep and wear our two fits of shirts forever, and at the same time, mix them and style them into your own wardrobe.”
The Alex Mill team has started to use #uniformsforindividuals as a tagline, and it couldn’t be more fitting for their brand’s bottom line. “Nothing should ever be too basic or too boring,” Sikhounmuong says. “Everyone knows what they look good in, but they still want to personalize the clothes to make them their own. We’ve included small, customizable details like these removable rosette buttons that come with each shirt and the interchangeable scarf and bandana straps on the tote bags.” Also, some of the blazers have been lined with the vintage scarves from Front General Store, so each is one of a kind. Outside of the actual garments, Alex Mill’s website includes editorial content that highlights this idea of mixing-and-matching and individualizing the garments. As Sikhounmuong explains, they’ve given the new collection to friends of the brand and “asked them to style themselves. We want to shine a light on the fact that these are real clothes and can be real uniforms in people’s real lives.”
Three days ahead of the launch, Sikhounmuong was busy choosing and placing the editorial images on the new site, a job he never had to do working as a design director at J.Crew and Madewell. “It’s been an all-hands-on-deck project,” he says with a laugh when referring to their start-up culture. “It’s been amazing, though. We really have the time to be able to give each piece of clothing the full attention it needs and deserves. We can have an edited point of view and be fully invested in the essentials that people need and want.”
Above, a first look at the new women’s collection for Alex Mill, in all its basic glory.
